


I Slit the Throat of Your Confidence

by sionnach_glic



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Anger, Angst, Depression, Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, Episode: s04e04 Marry ... Kill, Episode: s04e05 Escape From the Happy Place, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Q's mad as hell and he isn't going to take it anymore, Romance, Sexuality, Stream of Consciousness, shit get deeps and real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-29 18:51:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18299987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sionnach_glic/pseuds/sionnach_glic
Summary: Q contemplates the quest for the seven keys. Did it change them or was it pointless?***And he was an idiot, because like any of that should have fucking mattered by that point, because it sure as hell didn’t matter to his seventy year old self.It all seemed like petty bullshit to that version of him, like time wasted running down the clock in the fourth quarter on stupid technicalities and penalty kicks, but he had hesitated and it had been enough to scare Eliot’s vulnerability all the way back under the bed and it would be another twenty fucking years before he’d manage to coax it back out again.





	I Slit the Throat of Your Confidence

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really proud of this story. I hope you enjoy it. I promise there are lots of tender moments between Q and El buried in here. This is a deep dive into Quentin's state of mind during 4x04, with heavy flashbacks to events in 3x05 and 4x05. It's gritty and angst-riddled and unapologetic. I'm fascinated with Quentin's arc these past two seasons. He’s done a near complete 180, particularly with regard to his thoughts on the importance of magic and quests and so has Eliot, albeit in the opposite direction. I don’t know what that spells for their relationship potential, but the quest has left these two with different conclusions. Eliot learned how to be vulnerable. Q learned how not to be. If these two ever do find their way back to each other, it feels like they may end up with very conflicting perspectives about some pretty fundamental things. 
> 
> This fic explores some of all that in a sort of stream of consciousness, with no true resolution, and that’s intentional. Q, well, even post-mosaic his mind flits from thought to thought (even if he isn't so susceptible to those thoughts anymore). Additionally, I don’t think their mosaic timeline was quite the picture perfect romance many make it out to be and I explore a lot of that here too. 
> 
> I have tried to write these two realistically (read: human). They do and think some shitty things about each other at times, which is expected from two people with painful pasts who are trying to learn how to deeply love one another while also trying (and often failing) to not fall victim to the perilous "jumping to conclusions" game. If angst is your thing, settle in.
> 
> If the title isn’t warning enough, this one goes for the feels. If you aren’t looking to punch a wall or have a good cry, then scurry along and perhaps come on back when you are. (I hope you do.)

“Molly is furious,” his mom is telling him with that sort of energy that indicates she wants him to commiserate with her, to confirm for her that _yes, mom, you’re definitely within your rights to be pissed off that your ex-husband inconvenienced you with his death_. 

“You know how she felt about _Ted_.” She says his name like it’s a naughty word, right up there with racial slurs and words like cunt. 

He knows what she really means, that it's somehow his fault Molly's furious. He almost shrugs. Maybe it was. So many things were his fault these days. Why not add this to the list too. 

“I know. I’m sorry—” He stops himself, abruptly revolted by the sound of his voice apologizing. 

 _You do that too much,_ Eliot would have said, _apologize._  

It’s strange to see his mother this way, younger, than he is – will be? – had been? And he notices the flaws, the vulnerability, the fears. She’s like how he was then, at that age. Middle-aged and selfish, anxious, worried, fixated on the idea that other people’s decisions – rather than his own – were the reason his life ended up how it did, that other people were to blame for that endless, dread-filled pit in his belly labeled _sense of fulfillment._  

He’d also learned the truth no one tells you, that becoming a parent didn’t lessen those feelings of selfishness and entitlement. If anything parenthood held this vague influence, had this way of heightening them because all your time went to this other person now, leaving none of it for yourself. 

The difference was he never let Teddy in on that secret like he mother did him, never let him see, not until he needed to know, not until he became a father himself. 

And he’d come to learn better, later, that he’d been the architect of his own life. He wishes he could impart that wisdom on to his mom now somehow, because she’s not like his father who had already known all that and it’s not a thing that can be taught. It can only be lived and either you get your head out of your ass long enough to figure it out before you die or you don’t. 

Maybe you realize it, learn it, in the next life. Maybe not. 

 _If souls have ages, mom,_ he thinks, _yours is a todder._

He wants to laugh, a hollow one, full of bitterness. Maybe he’s no better, maybe that very thought is just the sort of self-aggrandizing that a young soul would have. 

Maybe he’s just as selfish as his mother, just as lacking of impulse control. 

He’s the one, after all, who went on a quest to bring back magic because he'd decided, somewhere in his selfish head, that magic wasn’t just worth a life. 

It was worth his _father’s._

He didn’t fucking think so anymore. Not when that decision had cost him the chance to be with his dad during his dying days. 

Had he been scared? Had someone, a nurse at least, been by his side? Did he have final words? Were there things he had wanted to tell him, that he had needed to say, before he passed away? 

Irrationally, maybe even somewhat crazed, Quentin momentarily considers visiting the Underworld to find out. 

 _The fuck you will,_ a voice in his head says. It sounds like Margo. 

He exhales, glancing around the garage, the stark walls, the hours they would spend here building planes, when all he really wanted to do was read Fillory and Further. He doesn’t want to be here. This place reminds him of their last conversation, of Teddy, of all the bullshit that had come with those memories, all the crap he never dealt with, that he had just pushed down, because he’d been too fucking busy on that stupid motherfucking quest, because it had been easier than confronting it. 

He wants to be anywhere but here. 

“There was no one at the funeral,” she murmurs, but he hears the dig. 

 _And neither were you._  

And she doesn’t mean it in the way other mothers might, in that overbearing concerned manner of _why weren’t you there, it’s important, for closure._ She means it as, _why did I birth you if not to keep me from exactly this sort of mess?_  

“Where were his friends?” She’s asking and he’s not prepared for the inquisition or the sudden concern in her voice, the malice masquerading on the tip of her tongue to cover up the sadness. 

His throat is tight. 

“I don’t know, I—” he says, snorting hollowly, a half ass attempt to keep the tightness in his throat at bay. 

It hardly works. 

His father had died alone because he wasn’t there, because he had been off on some stupid fucking quest that took more from him, from all of them, than it had ever given them back in return.

 _On this quest I’ve lived a whole life . . ._ Those, _those_ were the stupid fucking words he’d given his father. _And what was all of that for if it’s not for this?_  

He thinks of Eliot, slumped in that chair, with his lifeless eyes, but then the image morphs, shifting, grotesquely, into the dead eyes of the monster. 

He shakes his head. 

He didn’t fucking know. Now, it seemed, it _felt_ , deep in his bones, like it had all been for nothing. Some cruel lesson the multiverse offered up to Quentin Coldwater and Eliot Waugh. 

And his dad had just— 

 _What was his name? Your son?_  

His dad had just believed it, _believed_ him, believed _in_ him in a way nobody else had. 

He hopes he was that kind of dad to Teddy if he’d ever even existed. If he still did. 

He should have _been_ there for his father the way Teddy had been there for him when Eliot had died. 

Instead, he’d been on a fucking quest. 

 _We paid a hell of price,_ he had told Jules.

 _And I’d do it again,_ she had replied, emphatic, staring at him, as she’d slowly come to realize, looking half-stunned, _but you wouldn’t._  

It hadn’t been a question. 

His father would be _alive_. A monster wouldn’t have Eliot trapped in his own body. Julia would still be a goddess. And he wouldn’t have these fucking memories from some other life floating around inside his head about a wife that died, a man who didn’t want him and a son that may have never existed.

“Don’t break anything,” he hears his mom say as she leaves. He rubs his hands down his face, jaw tight, thinking about that fucking ugly puke green ashtray. The ceramic one that only came out during the holidays, with the Christmas tree on it that looked like it’d been imprinted there into the clay with a toothpick, the “ _xmas, ‘71”_ carved onto the back of it. 

He broke that and that was just the start. He broke Jules. He broke Alice. He broke Fillory. He broke magic. He broke what he had with Eliot. He broke his fucking dad. 

He grabs a fucking box. 

He knows he should be taking more care, wrapping the planes in bubble wrap or newspaper and not over-packing the boxes, making sure they lay just right – that’s what his father would have wanted – but he feels like he might implode if he spends one more hour here so he packs them haphazardly, and that’s how the monster finds him, growing frustrated, trying to untether a WWII Wildcat from the ceiling, wishing he could untether Eliot from this thing instead.

One glance at it and that feeling of implosion grows, an atom bomb buried in his chest, this one armed, and so he looks away, struggling to reign in his rage. 

 _This must be what it’s like for the Hulk,_ he broods dimly. 

 _Dude. Seriously?_ Penny40 says in his head, arms crossed, shaking his head, disgusted _. How the fuck do you ever get laid?_ Head case Penny flips him off. 

Quentin raises a languid mental middle finger in reply. 

“I thought you’d get angry and kill things . . .” It’s saying, with his face and his eyes and his mouth. 

He wants to. Some part of him wants to shoot shit. But then he thinks of Teddy because parts of this thing – it’s naïve childlike voice, that ruthless innocence – reminds him of his son, of when he was seven, with so many questions and just as much defiance. 

_Why can’t snakes fly? Can bears breath underwater? Why do you work on this stupid puzzle anyway when we could just play capture the creature all day instead? Why can’t I have a brother? Do hippogriffs sound like elephants or giraffes? Saby always has braids in her hair, can I have braids in mine? Is Earth aalllll the way out there? With the stars? How far? Is this a rock? What about this, what rock is this? And this rock? And this rock? Do they have rocks like this on Earth?_

Eliot had just stared at him, arms raised in mock defeat, with a barely contained laugh and a smirk that said, _Don’t look at me. He’s clearly **your** son. _

_But serious dad, why **don’t** we eat ants? Which is your favorite, the Winter’s Doe or the Great Cock – **and** why? Why can’t we have cakes for supper aalllllll the time? Why do I have to brush my teeth? Sometimes you don’t. Will I be as tall as you or as tall as pop? Fine, a sister, why can’t I just have a sister? Where did mom go? _

_Will we go to the same place too?_

Eliot had always fielded those tougher questions, the ones that were harder for Quentin to answer because they were too painful.

And so it’s for Teddy now that he tells the monster, “It’s not really what people do,” like he could somehow foolishly, absurdly, be a role model to this ancient evil thing when the gods themselves couldn’t even fucking figure it out.

 _That’s not how it is daaaad._ That had been Teddy’s favorite answer to everything then. He’d have this all-knowing set to his jaw that was suspiciously reminiscent of Brakebills Eliot, arms crossed, talking back, upper lip out, but in a manner that meant he was supposed to be taken _very_ seriously. _We learned different in school and Mr. Wefwets says you’re from Earth and you don’t know squat about it. And neither do you pop!_

“Frozen Peas?” 

He waves it off. Sometimes it’s surreal to be with the monster and if he wasn’t so depressed he might have laughed, but instead he finds himself trying to convince it to give him a few minutes to grieve his father, to try to make some sense out of this fucking shit storm that’s his life now thanks to that fucking quest. 

“This is a very interesting game,” it’s saying. “The loving your dead dad game.” A pause. Quentin buries an irritated sigh, that imploding feeling returning, the velocity of the bomb’s ticking countdown climbing. “I don’t understand it.” 

“It’s not a game. It—” He shakes his head. Whatever else it was, _is_ , the monster, he can tell, is being genuine and some part of Quentin feels sorry for it then. He switches tacts, speaking to it the same way he would Teddy. “There must be someone who’s important to you? Who you miss?” 

But the monster doesn’t know and Quentin’s not sure why that surprises him, and he doesn’t care, only half listening now, as he stares at Eliot’s body – possessed by this thing – for the longest he thinks he ever has. Staring, at that fucking ridiculous t-shirt El would never be caught wearing. Staring, at his greasy face and the bags under his eyes. Staring, at Eliot’s unkempt hair, the unruliness of it, the chaos, the way it had always been in Fillory. 

 _Ugh, thank the gods they haven’t invented photographs here,_ he’d grumbled once, complaining about his locks, but Quentin had always secretly preferred him like that, a little chaotic, _unmade_ , the way Eliot never really allowed himself to be in their other life. 

But if he ever gets Eliot back he thinks that will no longer be the same now. In his darkest places, he worries if he’ll even be able to look at him at all. 

Quentin had disagreed with him about the photographs, wishing that they had a way to document what they’d built. He would have photographed Teddy and the grandkids and Arielle. He would have photographed the village and the town, the marketplace that was so familiar yet so distinctly strange, so . . . _Fillory_. 

And he would have photographed Eliot. 

Eliot, laughing at him for being foolish or for something stupid that he said, Eliot, still young and lounging on the mosaic in the middle of a hot summer day, glistening, Eliot, seated by the fire in winter, that ugly ass blanket wrapped around him, kinetic, with pent up energy, frustrated, desperate for spring, Eliot chasing Teddy around the fields and catching him, Eliot, smothered by the grandkids, and always, always Eliot asleep in their bed . . . 

Some nights, after they had stopped sleeping together, after Arielle had come along, after she had died on the side of the riverbank, he had lain awake, just watching him sleep, watching each breath he’d take, wishing he could feel them against him, trying to memorize his face in case he lost him too. Eliot had always looked so vulnerable in those moments, his mask, his devil-may-care attitude stripped away like the way men shed clothes. 

And there had been that night, the one he thought about so often, from after Teddy had moved away and married Saby, when they’d finally found each other’s bodies again. 

It was a memory that he still conjured, even now, when he was alone.

It had been spring and the rains had come and Quentin had been relieved because it meant a day away from the mosaic. They’d spent the day in bed eating and fucking and sleeping and it had been the sounds of the water, smattering on the thatched roof, a roll of thunder peeling in the distance, that had woken him in the middle of the night, followed by Eliot’s arm, heavy and solid, lain across his waist, two fingers tracing an idle loop around his hipbone, his other hand propping up his head, his eyes still, watching him. 

It was Eliot’s gaze he remembered most of all, how his face had had this pained look, like he’d been thinking too much. 

Eliot’s fingertips had traveled up the plains of his torso, pausing at his ribs, fingers spreading wide there. The sensation had caused Quentin to suck in a breath, and a lop-sided smile to bloom on Eliot’s lips, both of their eyes still fixed on the other’s. 

A silence had settled in between them then, one that was deafening, buzzing, _alive_ , so loud that Quentin could hear Eliot breathing, maybe his heart beating too and there had been something there, on Eliot’s face that had left him waiting, wanting, and then there was something thick in the air as his chest had tightened in that way it only ever did when he watched Eliot sleep, when he had worried over losing him too. 

It had been unbearable. 

 _Eliot—_ he had whispered then, needing to fill it with something, his name thick on his tongue, unsure of even what he had wanted to say, but that was a lie, he had known exactly what he had wanted to say and what Eliot had wanted to say too. It had felt like the space between his lungs would fucking explode if one of them didn’t say it. 

But Eliot had brushed his thumb across his bottom lip, still holding his gaze, looking like he might cry, his eyes so soft and big, like the way they had been on the day he had crowned him High King, and Quentin had swallowed down the rest of whatever words he had planned to say because his chest was too tight to speak. 

Then they had just lain there, staring at each other as if blinking would somehow make the other disappear, back to their other reality, back to their lives from before, fingers tracing the shapes of each other’s faces in the dead of night, as if the darkness would somehow help them lock in the sense memory.

 _Q,_ Eliot had finally murmured after a long while, and in the pause that had followed that heavy thing settled in again, just hanging there, in the air, like humidity in the shade. It was the thing they both had wanted to confess, to say, the thing that they were both too fucking cowardly to voice. Eliot had parted his lips, apparently finding courage, but Quentin, stupidly still afraid, and being a fucking idiot, had swallowed whatever he was struggling to say with his mouth. 

 _Let’s save our overthinking for the puzzle, yeah?_  

“I’ll sit still,” the monster is saying. “And I won’t kill anything and I’ll watch you while you— you— you— think about your dead father?” It’s face, the way it pulls in Eliot’s brows, in that odd mix of confusion and charming ridicule, reminds him so much of Eliot that it pulverizes his heart. It was a face Teddy had later somehow perfected too and he’d always wondered if Eliot had taught it to him or if he’d just learned it naturally, through mimicry. 

Gods, he misses him. He misses his lover, but more than anything he just misses his best fucking friend. 

“Is that what you’re doing?” It asks. 

“Yeah,” he tells the monster, truthfully, “kind of.” 

“This is the weirdest thing,” it says with wonder, grabbing the peas and Quentin watches, questioning, feeling uneasy now, about how well this thing is taking care of Eliot’s body. 

 _We’ll take him to Chatwin’s Torrent,_ he thinks, his anxiety creeping in, and for a moment he feels like the old Quentin, the one from before the mosaic, who let his thoughts take hold, spiraling him down, but it’s happening again now and before long he’s nearly frantic with concern. _Once he’s back, we’ll go back there, like we did in our Fillory._

 _Q, come back up here,_ Eliot would say to him whenever he had spiraled down, during those early days, fuck, who he is kidding, those early _years_ , when the anxiety over solving the mosaic would suffocate him. _Come back up here and feel me,_ he would murmur, again and again, grounding him with his hands rather than useless words, drawing him back, returning him to the present, to life. 

He knows now, he _knows_ this atom bomb in his chest isn’t just about his father. It’s about Alice and, as she had put it once, _our garbage fire of a relationship that ended with Eliot’s dick in your mouth_. It’s about magic being unable to fix the dark parts of him. It’s about the unexpected loss of Arielle. It’s about Eliot—the Eliot he had left behind, next to their cottage, in Fillory. The Eliot he had wanted to say so many things to and never did because he had been too much of a fucking coward. 

He remembers touching Eliot for the last time in their other life. How he had selfishly left his body unburied for hours, still trying to memorize his face, terrified that he wouldn’t and he remembers eventually that he didn’t, that he had lost that too. He remembers thinking of keeping Eliot’s flask, before instead tucking it in with his body, placing his cane in one hand, wishing he had photographs to clutch into the other, so that maybe he wouldn’t feel so alone going wherever he was going. 

Once he was in the ground though it felt like the loneliness had become Quentin’s entirely, a sad smile rising on his mouth, wondering if Eliot was already in the underworld, surrounded by all of their friends. 

It hadn’t given him as much solace as he would have liked. 

_Let’s save our overthinking for the puzzle, yeah?_

How he’s come to fucking loathe those words now. 

And it was that memory, it’s that fucking memory, the memory of burying his best friend’s body – being seventy three and smothered in his own regret, regret over the things he had never said to Eliot that he should have – _that_ memory, more than any other, that caused him to say what he did to Eliot that day in the throne room, when they got their memories back. 

He would rather be brave and rejected than ever be made to feel that sort of suffocating regret again. There were no take backs. Not when you fucking died. 

And it’s about Teddy too, maybe it’s all about Teddy, and that question he always keeps himself from asking, the one he’s kept buried down since the day the memories came back, the one that somehow bubbles up on sleepless nights. The not knowing what happened to him. Did he pop out of existence when they failed to walk through that clock? Why didn’t he remember dying in Fillory like Eliot did? Did he die there? Had it all been a dream? But then why did it feel like memories rather than dreams? 

He abruptly regrets that Jane Chatwin is dead because if she were still alive she could at least answer some of his questions. 

He wonders if she’s in the underworld now with his father, with the other Eliot, the Fillory one, if he ever existed at all. 

 _Dude,_ the voice of Penny40 starts, _fucking no to this underworld bullshit._  

He flips Penny40 off again in his mind – _what the fuck does he know_ – as he deliberates whether Jane Chatwin could still be in the clock barrens, where Margo had left her.

 _That timey-wimey ginger cunt_ \- Margo again - _is the reason we’re all in this fucking limp dick clusterfuck._  

He fucking agrees and he vows then, he _vows_ , that if they ever make it out of this clusterfuck alive, if they ever get back to Fillory, he’ll take Eliot with him, and together they’ll find her and get some fucking answers. 

Whatever else Eliot had said to him that day in the throne room, he remembers one thing vividly and it’s the way Eliot had felt for Teddy, that he fucking _loved_ him, maybe more than he even loved Quentin or himself, more than anything and that’s how he knows, he fucking _knows_ , Eliot has the same questions he does. 

He wonders what he would find if he went to the cottage now. Would the mosaic still be there? Would Eliot’s body? Would there be a family there? Were their descendants littered across Fillory? He wonders if the time key is still locked in Castle Blacksp— 

“I thought this would be interesting,” the monster is saying and then Quentin’s talking to him like he would Teddy again, like he would on the days they’d be at the market and he’d want to go home so that they could play capture the creature before it got too dark and then, later, so that he could get home to flirt with Saby.

_A little while longer. Then we can go._

The monster does just like Teddy would, not buying it, asking why he’s doing any of this, not understanding, and the timer on the bomb in his chest reaches defcon 1.

“Because I told my mom I _would_ , okay?” _Jesus_ , _I sound like I’m fucking fifteen._ “Christ, I can’t believe I’m having to explain this . . .” 

He groans, heaving a sigh wondering where the _fuck_ Jack Bauer is. 

And then he just . . . detonates, diving deep into some therapy shit with this thing that’s wearing Eliot’s face, breaking and smashing and stomping his father’s planes like the fucking toddler he is - the Hellcats, the Spitfires, the Mustangs, the Warhawks - all of them, crashing, flying against the wall, breaking apart, just like his fucking heart. 

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, vaguely, he wonders if Teddy did anything like this when he died and he hopes that, if he had needed to, that he did and then Quentin is dropping, falling, right into a memory, like he's fucking Harry, putting up with Dumbledore's pensieve bullshit. That's how it happened sometimes. 

It had been a summer night, the kind where it was too muggy to sleep inside, to muggy to sleep at all. They were outside, huddled on the featherbed, Teddy eight or nine and wedged between them, Eliot regaling him with a _very_ embellished, filtered story about Quentin and Aunt Alice and cirque du soleil. 

But Quentin could tell Teddy was only half-listening, that something was troubling him, because his eyes were fixed on the night sky, his brows slammed tight, and his bottom lip pulled between his teeth. 

It was his thinking too hard face. 

And then he had asked, interrupting Eliot mid sentence, in a voice so quiet and small, that Quentin hadn’t even been sure he’d heard the words right, _Can I visit earth with you someday?_  

Quentin had gone very, very still, his eyes meeting Eliot’s. 

Eliot had wrapped Teddy up in a hug. _Yeah, teddy bear,_ he had told him, at once, _as soon as we solve the puzzle._  

 _But— But what if you solve it when I’m at school or playing with Micah or— or— what if I’m asleep?_ He had sounded so frightened and Quentin had wondered then, guiltily, how long he’d been worrying about this. Over Teddy’s shoulder he had locked eyes with Eliot’s again, neither leaving the other’s face as he’d given Eliot a petitioning look, his throat too tight to take this one. 

Eliot pulled out of the hug to look Teddy in the eye. _Then we’ll wait for you,_ Eliot had murmured, conviction in his voice, but Quentin could hear how rough the words were, Eliot’s eyes glassy. 

 _No matter what?_ The fear had still been there. 

 _No matter what,_ Quentin had told him, swallowing his heart back down into his chest.

They stopped completing puzzles when Teddy wasn’t there after that, up until the day Teddy had told them that they didn’t have to do that anymore, the same day that he told them that he had decided to ask Saby to marry him. 

He wishes Eliot could be with him now. He’d have some clever thing to say to make him feel better or to at least make him feel less alone. 

He takes another plane, a Hellfire, heaving it against the door, pacing. 

Seeing Teddy that day, that day he’d told them about Saby, the way his face had lit up, had made Quentin happy for him, and relieved, relieved that someone would be there with him if they weren’t. But there had been this other part of him too, smaller and deeper, both ashamed and bitter because it was jealous and envious of the thing his son had that he still wanted. He missed it, the way it felt to be young and in love, as if the entire universe – no the multiverse – was filled with this untapped potential that (it seemed) had been crafted just for you.

But he’d fucked up with Alice and then Eliot and then Ari had died. And while Eliot and he would eventually, later, find there way partially back to each other, that thick empty space, the one they never filled with the things they wanted to say, stayed between them. 

And they had carried that damned fucking space all the way with them, right into this life. 

That fucking space. 

He grabs three planes from the Monster’s hands then, slamming them one after the other after the other against the wall. 

Their discomforts and vulnerabilities were what _allowed_ that space to keep fucking existing and the biggest contributor had once been his own shit, about being with a man long-term and what that meant, and that’s what had fucked them both in Fillory. 

But he was over that now and now it was different. Now that space, it seemed, was being feed by something else, by _Eliot’s_ discomfort with being a gay man in a relationship with a bisexual one, and not locked away on another planet in a cottage, but here on Earth. Q sometimes wondered how badly that idea - the two of them being in a relationship - collided with Eliot’s romantic fantasies of what a serious long term relationship should look like. Had Eliot seen himself ending up with a man like him, a man that preferred men, maybe only men? Was _that_ the issue? 

 _Q, I know you and you’re . . . not . . ._  

The way Eliot had been such a dick about it, just steamrolling over his sexuality because of his own fucking fears, had pissed Quentin off, but he’d pushed it all down, down, down because he could taste those fifty years of regret far more than his petty anger and Eliot’s fear, and he didn’t know how many more times they were going to have to have this fucking argument before Eliot would finally just fucking _see_.

And Quentin's reaching now, for whatever he can, not even bothering to recognize the planes, slamming all of it against the walls, against the doors, fucking shouting, _FUUUCK! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!_  

The quest hadn’t just been fucking pointless. It had been a cruel sick fucking joke. 

_What does it matter?_

He had said it, thinking, confidently, that after fifty fucking years, Eliot could see that it _didn’t_ , thinking of that night, when they had just stared at each other, both of them knowing the truth, feeling it, there in the air, in their bodies, in their mouths, even if their mouths never said the words. 

But Eliot had let his fucking fear win out, over his vulnerability, spurting out all that bullshit about _choice_. 

Quentin couldn’t say he blamed him. He sometimes wondered if it was Eliot just being spiteful, getting back at him for what had happened between them forty-five years earlier. 

_If you want to live your life, live it here._

_What’s that supposed to mean?_ Even now, he cringes at the memory and the way he had asked it, like some petulant punk.

Eliot had been right. He had known. He had known _exactly_ what it had meant. Quentin had heard what Eliot had left out, lout and clear: _with me. Live it here, with me._  

And he had hesitated for the same fucking reasons Eliot had hesitated in the throne room – because he didn’t know if he wanted to settle down yet, because he didn’t know if he wanted to do that with man, because he didn’t think Eliot would actually prefer him if they _weren’t_ in Fillory and he had made the mistake of telling him that, in the midst of an argument about fucking rabbit stew, and he was an idiot, because like any of that should have fucking mattered by that point, because it sure as hell didn’t matter to his seventy year old self. 

It all seemed like petty bullshit to that version of him, like time wasted running down the clock in the fourth quarter on stupid technicalities and penalty kicks, but he had hesitated and it had been enough to scare Eliot’s vulnerability all the way back under the bed and it would be another twenty fucking years before he’d manage to coax it back out again. 

And then Ari came along and maybe that’s when it all went to shit, as if he’d just proved Eliot right, or maybe he’d taken to Ari just to spite him, to say, _see, you bastard, you were fucking right about me,_ but that’s what gave them Teddy and he wasn’t sorry. 

He doubted Eliot was either.

And yeah, it had taken twenty years to convince Eliot to let him back in again, but, eventually, he did.

Yet this bullshit about choice was still haunting them. 

Not that any of it mattered now because Eliot was lost. 

He slumps down onto his knees, exhausted, fisting his hair in his hands, the monster looking positively gleeful. 

“It feels good, after you deal with death, doesn’t it?” It’s saying, in that sick twisted way that reminds him this isn’t Eliot. 

 _Eliot’s still here, you idiot,_ the Margo voice says then, _grow a pair._  

He wants to believe it. Gods, does he want to. Maybe Eliot was still in there, somewhere, somewhere inside. 

“A little,” he admits, because it did. “Still hurts, but . . .” He pauses, thinking of Arielle. “but eventually it hurts a little less.” 

He didn’t know if that was true for Teddy, but he did know it was true for Eliot. The only reason losing him in Fillory hurt less now was because he had gotten him back. 

And that resolves him then. They would get him back. _He_ would get him back. Or he would fucking die trying. And he doesn’t know when it happened, when he changed his mind, when he decided that Eliot’s one life was worth burning the whole world down, but it is because fuck magic and fuck the library, and fuck quests.

“I’m going to need your help to search for more gods. You would be more useful to me if you feel better . . .” it’s saying and he’s barely listening, his mind meandering back to the quest and how all of it had led them to this fucking nightmare, when the monster delivers a new, neatly packaged pile of nuclear waste into his lap. 

“So, you should know your friend Eliot is dead.” 

It takes a moment for the words to register because the monster, in its sick way, speaks about awful things in the same way it does nice ones. 

 _You’re lying,_ he almost shouts, but it has no reason to. And it takes everything in him then to remain still as those words sink in, another warhead in his chest, counting down, quietly exploding, the space between lungs collapsing, annihilated. 

_Q._

_Come back up here,_ Eliot’s voice is saying, soothing. 

 _Come back up here and feel me._  

“I felt his soul die,” the monster tells him later and he’s a mask of indifference on the outside, a thing he learned to be from Eliot, but inside he’s frantic, worried, worried about what those words mean for Eliot in the underworld. His _soul_. What did that mean? 

Maybe he had been right before, when he had told Jules that the quest had been trying to make him cold, that it had wanted, maybe even _needed_ him to become, to _be_ , ruthless. 

 _If that’s the case then the quest fucked up when it choose Quentin Coldwater,_ Jules echoes in his head. 

But no, he thinks, now. 

It hadn’t. It hadn’t fucked up at all. 

He was going to kill this fucking thing. It was all that mattered now. Killing this fucking murderous piece of shit, getting vengeance, stopping it from hurting anyone else.

And if he didn’t die trying to kill it, then he was going to go to the mirror world after or murder himself, _something_ , whatever it took to go chasing after Eliot Waugh in the underworld, to tell him all the things he should have said, all of the _I'm sorrys,_ all of the _I'm fucking in love with yous_ , because his dad was dead and fuck magic and fuck fucking quests and he owed it, he _owed_ it to his fucking seventy three year old self, to get him back some of the time his younger self had stolen.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the magical Third Eye Blind, _Thanks a Lot_ , which is angsty and pissy and cynical, just like these two fools (thought the lyrics are a better fit for Alice and Quentin). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arzcDCHpc9s
> 
> Thank you so much for reading.


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